1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of processing information and more specifically to controlling the playback of media.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some television commercials irritate some viewers. The audio itself can be particularly undesirable. For example, many television advertisements are often louder than other programming while also being unappealing in any other respect. Therefore a diligent television viewer might pick up the remote control and mute the television audio while the advertisement plays. When the advertisement concludes, the viewer un-mutes the audio as the programming resumes. This process is distracting and tedious.
For previously recorded programming stored on a digital video recorder (DVR), the user might elect to fast-forward through the commercials rather than mute the commercial audio. In this case, the viewer's attentiveness and actions are typically still required to avoid loud, distasteful commercial audio content.
Loud television commercials have gotten so bad that the United States Congress passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act in 2010. However, in the first six months after the legislation went into effect, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received 15,580 complaints about loud commercials. Loud television commercials remain widely disliked.
Some technology is available to maintain a volume limit across both program and commercials. Other technology based on video signal processing seeks to identify commercial boundaries. With those boundaries determined, a system could mute the offending audio or, for playback from a recording, skip the undesirable commercials entirely. U.S. Pat. No. 4,750,213 A to Albert P. Novak discloses a method and system for editing unwanted content from transmitted program material. U.S. Pat. No. 8,249,497, to Michael I. Ingrassia and Jeffery T. Lee, describes systems and methods for seamlessly switching media playback between a media broadcast, such as a radio broadcast, and media from a local media library. Another approach simply gives the user a button to skip a three-minute block of recorded video.